in|discussion
This public lecture series is a forum to discuss contemporary issues and current research in typography, art, design, material culture, critical theory, pedagogy, philosophy, society and technology.

As part of our ongoing reflections on Grangegorman as the new campus for the DIT, we have invited two speakers who will reflect on their experiences as clinical practitioners and whose perspectives are marked by a critique of the psychiatric institution. Dr. Ivor Browne is a well known psychiatrist who worked for many years in Grangegorman where he oversaw the process of deinstitutionalisation and introduced new forms of community-based recovery. Dr. Ciaran Smyth is co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts and research platform Vagabond Reviews. In his previous capacity as a psychologist he worked in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation and collaborated with Ivor Browne on developing alternatives to traditional models of psychiatric recovery.

Dr. Ivor Browne: Ivor Browne is Professor Emeritus, University College, Dublin and retired as Chief Psychiatrist of the then Eastern Health Board in 1994. Over the last four decades, he has been a central and controversial figure in Irish life up until the mid-nineties when he retired. Part of this was his fearless opposition to orthodox psychiatry.As a young man he was given a fellowship to Harvard University where he studied Public and Community Mental Health. He returned to Ireland determined to put what he had learned into practice and it was his initiative which took the care of mental patients away from large institutions into the community. Recent books include Ivor Browne: Music and Madness (2009) and The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps along the road, the evolution of a slow learner (2013) both published by Cork University Press.

Ciaran Smyth: Smyth works with Ailbhe Murphy as Vagabond Reviews <http://www.vagabondreviews.org/> an interdisciplinary platform combining socially engaged art and research practice. Upcoming projects in 2015 include Temporary Institute for the Study of Contemporary Symbolic Violence for Workhouse Union, a project by Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch. Current work includes Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles for the exhibition Phoenix Rising, Art and the Civic Imagination curated by Logan Sisley and currently on exhibition at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery. Ciaran was awarded his PhD in 2004 from the Department of Sociology at University College Dublin. His research there combined an ethnography of a contemporary public psychiatric system with a post-structuralist analysis of mental medicine in its community-based mode of operations. In the 1990s Ciaran developed the CAMUS Project in collaboration with Prof. Ivor Browne. The CAMUS Project was formulated as an emancipatory educational alternative to traditional rehabilitation programmes for those recovering from a first hospitalisation.

in|discussion The Construction of Madness | KnowledgeThe Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM), the School of Art, Design and Printing and the School of Languages, Law and Social Sciences, together recognize the importance of the history of the new site in Grangegorman and are organizing a series of public interventions to prompt reflection and discussion.

In recent times many public buildings have been re-purposed from the austere institutions they once were. The new Art School in Limerick, for instance, was a Magdalene Laundry and the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology was once a Reform School. These public buildings reflect the disciplinary and carceral regimes of a near past that has been air-brushed by generations of reform. The new Grangegorman Campus is one such venture that seeks to transform, repurpose and regenerate the local area.

So the Grangegorman site is more than a resolution to accommodation problems. We would like to take the opportunity to mark the move and transformations in a way that draws attention to the site itself: the setting, the history, the architecture, and the institution that continues to operate there. It offers a moment to reflect on the deeply embedded social and psychic meanings, memories and materialised practices much of which may have been obscured by the design and architectural interventions in the renovation conducted on the site. As an educational institution, the developments seeks to turn an inward-looking enclosed site to face the city and the immediate community that will render its previous purpose to history: this history also needs to be opened out rather than shut in. Further, the aim then is to frame and address it as a significant feature of our all too recent collective experience which continues to resonate in the everyday lives of the wider community.

The first of these interventions will hear from a number of invited scholars and public figures who can speak to the site, the institution, its practices, the architecture, its histories, its significance and meaning in the development of the State and the communities within and outside Grangegorman. We are also conscious that this needs to be a public exchange and debate not least to inform but also to stimulate further discussion around institutions, policies and general mental health issues and wellbeing.

The biggest risk we face
is the risk to change the world for the better so that the problems that
normally face us, such as climate change and poverty, do not have the same
influence on our lives. This lecture will address the risk of creating a new
culture of sustainability, where we can live closer to ecological principles
and the ideals of social justice. The lecture deals with task designers face in
deciding what kind of world they want to help bring about and then how they can
cooperate to make the one in which we currently live more resilient.

***

Victor Margolin is Professor
Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is a
founding editor and now co-editor of the academic design journal Design
Issues. Professor Margolin has published widely on diverse design topics
and lectured at conferences, universities, and art schools in many parts of the
world. Books that he has written, edited, or co-edited include Propaganda:
The Art of Persuasion, WW II,The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko,
Lissitsky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1936, Design Discourse, Discovering Design,
The Idea of Design, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design
Studies, and Culture is Everywhere: The Museum of Corn-temporary Art. He
is currently working on a World History
of Design,to be published by Bloomsbury. The first two of three
volumes are scheduled for publication in December 2014.

All are welcome to this
free public event.

To secure your place,
please book by email:indiscussionadp@gmail.com

in|discussion is a forum on contemporary issues and current research in
typography, art, design, material culture, critical theory, pedagogy,
philosophy, society and technology. Updates on the lecture series at: http://indiscussionadp.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Propaganda and Protest Graphics:
A Selective View of Civic Empowerment and Resistance by Artists and Designers

6pm Wednesday, 12th March 2014

Lecture Room G6, School
of Art Design and Printing

Dublin
Institute of Technology, 41
Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1

This lecture
will explore a selective contemporary view of propaganda and protest through the
graphic arts, which has always mirrored the technological innovations such as
movable type, lithography, offset printing and now personal computers and the
Internet. Life-altering events such as recent political upheavals, health
concerns, and natural disasters linked to climate change, stimulate artists and
designers to increasingly use their visual work to comment on the world in
which they live.

The Internet’s role in expanding the channels of communication beyond the
printed page through electronic distribution has become the new paradigm in the
new millennium. Digital tools afford artists and designers the means to make,
distribute and disseminate images and information to influence opinion, raise
consciousness, raise funds for humanitarian causes, and encourage the global
community to act for change.

Elizabeth Resnick is Professor and currently
Chair of Graphic Design at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston,
Massachusetts USA. She is a passionate design curator who has organized six
comprehensive design exhibitions, most with co-curators, including Russell Mills: Within/Without (1991)
with Teresa Flavin, Dutch Graphic Design:
1918-1945 (1994) with Alston W. Purvis, Makoto
Saito: Art of the Poster (1999) with Jan Kubasiewicz, The Graphic Imperative: International Posters of Peace, Social Justice
and The Environment (2005) with Chaz Maviyane-Davies and Frank Baseman, Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of
International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985–2010 with Javier Cortés (2010),
and Graphic Advocacy: International
Posters for the Digital Age: 2001–2012 (2012).

Her publications include catalogues for the
exhibitions mentioned above, Design for
Communication: Conceptual Graphic Design Basics (2003), Graphic Design: A Problem-Solving Approach
to Visual Communication for Prentice-Hall Publications (1984), and is
currently completing a new book Developing
Citizen Designers, to be published by Bloomsbury Academic.

in|discussion is a forum on contemporary issues and current research in
typography, art, design, material culture, critical theory, pedagogy,
philosophy, society and technology. Updates on the lecture series at: http://indiscussionadp.blogspot.com/

Bernard Stiegler is one of the leading French philosophers of our generation.
He develops the work Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon, and Andre Le
Roi-Gourhan in a wide-ranging analysis of our relationship with technology.
Stiegler established himself in France in 1994 with the publication of the
first volume of Technics and Time. This three-volume series has now been
published in English translation by Stanford University Press.

Since Technics and Time,Stiegler has remained a prolific author,
publishing, for example, the two volumes of De la misère symbolique (‘Of
Symbolic Misery’) in 2004, three volumes of Mécréance et discrédit (‘Disbelief
and Discredit’) from 2005 to 2006, Constituer l’Europe (‘Constituting Europe’)
in 2005, and Prendre soin (‘Taking Care’) in 2008. Most recently, his Pharmacologie
du Front National (2013) continues the project of ‘positive pharmacology’
which he started in 2010 with the publication of Ce qui fait que la vie vaut
la peine d'être vécue: De la pharmacologie (‘What Makes Life Worth
Living: On Pharmacology’, in 2013).

BERNARD STIEGLER is Head of the Department of Cultural Development at the
Pompidou Center in Paris, Professor at Université de Technologie de Compiègne
and Visiting Professor to Goldsmiths, University of London. In addition, he is
Director of the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, founder in 2005 of the
political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis, and founder in 2010 of the
philosophy school, Ecole de Philosophie d’Epineuil-le-Fleuriel.

in|discussionpublic lecture series 2013

John MullarkeyThe Photography of Philosophy

Franois Laruelles concept of non-standard philosophy is said to expand the definition of what counts as philosophical thought. However, this gesture goes beyond merely relativizing thought within a neo-liberal pluralism that is actually indifferent to philosophy (all opinions are valid) or anarchizing science as part of a methodology where anything goes. Rather, the flat thought Laruelle strives for is democratic because it is materialized in different ways, some of them scientific (quantum physics, fractal geometry), some of them aesthetic (cinema, photography). The non-standard philosophy of photography, for instance, is not simply the generation of new thoughts (about appearances, subjectivity, light, etc) through an unorthodox source, but the materialization of all thought through a photography of philosophy. In this talk, I want to explore such a photography of philosophy as a non-philosophical practice, especially in terms of the materiality of photographic practice as it involves posture, figure/ground, definition, and resolution not as mere metaphors, but as already actualised mutations of what counts as philosophical practice.

John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Kingston University, London. He has also taught philosophy and film theory at the University of Sunderland, England (1994-2004) and the University of Dundee, Scotland (2004 to 2010). He has published Bergson and Philosophy (1999), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), and co-edited Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (2012) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy (2013). He is an editor of the journal Film-Philosophy, and chair of the Society for European Philosophy. His work explores variations of 'non-standard-philosophy', arguing that philosophy is a subject that continually shifts its identity through engaging with supposedly non-philosophical fields such as film theory and animal studies (the realm of 'outsider thought' with which he is most acquainted). He is currently working on a book entitled Reverse Mutations: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy.

All are welcome to this free event, but places are limited.Please book by email: indiscussionadp@gmail.com

in|discussion ?This public lecture series is a forum to discuss contemporary issues and current research in typography, art, design, material culture, critical theory, pedagogy, philosophy, society and technology. The series follows the launch of the BA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of Art Design and Printing DIT: http://bavacs.blogspot.com/